Gardens to visit: Wrest Park, Bedfordshire

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Jemima, Marchioness Grey, decidedly preferred her own garden. She travelled widely and the decision was not made lightly.

For almost 20 years she had observed and examined and, in reams of letters, appraised gardens belonging to friends, family and tastemakers such as Horace Walpole. None rivalled the place in her heart occupied by her own garden: not Stowe, where the temples were 'heavy’ and the Chinese House occupied 'a little dirty Piece of Water’; not Studley Royal, Wroxton, Shugborough or even Strawberry Hill. Jemima Grey’s taste was for the garden she had inherited in 1740 from her grand­father, the 1st Duke of Kent.

That garden, an oasis of 'mystery, privacy and shade’, stood at the centre of a large estate near Silsoe in Bedfordshire which Jemima’s family, the de Greys, owned from the Middle Ages until 1917. Its name was Wrest Park.

So convinced of Wrest’s charms was the Marchioness that when, in the late 1750s, she employed Lancelot 'Capability’ Brown to soften the hard geometry of the Duke’s highly formal, early-18th-century garden, she kept him on a very short rein indeed.

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Hulton Archive

Brown’s work was confined to the garden’s periphery, and consisted of blurring the distinction between the garden edges and the surrounding landscape with its views towards the Chilterns. Trees were cleared, meandering paths cut through naturalistic 'clump’ planting, the hard lines of several of the smaller canals 'bent’ and tweaked. It was, in its way, an exercise in minimal intervention. (Brown himself apparently agreed that to have done more would have been to 'unravel the mysteries of the garden’.)

For the next century and a half, Jemima Grey’s descendants would honour her decision: successive alterations to the garden continued to respect much of what survived. In addition to the work of 'Capability’ Brown, its long evolution embraces the influence of some of the most renowned names in 18th-century design: Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, Lord Burlington, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Thomas Archer, Batty Langley and William Chambers.

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The huge garden is ornamented with a clutch of handsome garden buildings. Thomas Archer’s pavilion of 1709-11 is a dazzling Baroque jeu d’esprit, inspired by the design of an ancient Roman temple published in the 16th century by Giovanni Battista Montano. Internally it retains its original painted trompe-l’oeil decoration, completed in 1712 by Louis Hauduroy, of classical architectural details including busts and statues in a dreamy underwater palette. It also includes several tiny bedrooms reached by narrow spiral staircases. These enigmatic chambers may once have recommended themselves for illicit dalliances – though the staircases make few concessions to the bulky frocks of past centuries.

Elsewhere in the garden, the rebuilt Chinese Temple is probably to a design by William Chambers, author of the Chinese Pagoda of 1762 at Kew Gardens. It was commissioned by Jemima Grey, who particularly admired the Chinese pavilion at her sister-in-law’s house, Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, and was once lined with brightly coloured 'India’ paper, in which the Marchioness interested herself closely. 'May [the painter] begin first with the yellow paper,’ she wrote to the superintendent of works at Wrest in September 1761, 'which he knows should not be made deeper than a straw colour.’

This is garden design as dialogue. Wrest is chiefly the work of three members of the de Grey family: the Duke of Kent, Jemima Grey and Thomas, Earl de Grey, an aide de camp to William IV who inherited the estate in 1833 and spent the remaining 26 years of his life rebuilding the house and enhancing the 90 acres of gardens cultivated by his predecessors.

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All three added to an existing garden and approached garden design as an intellectual as well as aesthetic exercise, the aim of which was not simply to delight the eye but to nurture and nourish the soul. All three also canvassed opinion widely and involved themselves in the minutiae of progress.

Between 1834 and 1839, Thomas de Grey replaced the existing house with a French-style mansion partly inspired by Jean Courtonne’s Hotel de Matignon in Paris. De Grey took an active – even a pedantic – interest in the realisation of his designs, choosing young, mostly novice craftsmen who could be guaranteed to work to his exact specifications without the intrusion into the project of any ego but his own.

'It is a family trait,’ says John Watkins, the head of gardens and landscapes at English Heritage, which has owned the house and garden since 2006. 'Everyone the de Greys employed they kept on a very short leash.’

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Today de Grey’s principal reception rooms have been restored and house an exhibition devoted to Wrest’s history, including the current, ongoing restoration. Behind the house, de Grey laid out an elaborate box-edged parterre planted with tulips and bedding plants, with scrolling coloured gravel paths which – despite subsequent simplifications necessitated by a much-reduced garden workforce – survives as one of Wrest’s glories. De Grey himself described the parterre as 'essentially in the French style of Louis XIV’. Extensive additional work on the parterre is planned for this winter.

Thomas de Grey’s death in 1859 represented a watershed moment for Wrest. Without male heirs, he left the estate to his daughter, Lady Anne Cowper, whose husband owned Panshanger Manor in Hertfordshire, where both husband and wife preferred to base themselves. Wrest ceased to be a principal home.

Inherited in turn by the 7th Earl Cowper, Auberon Thomas Hervert and the 8th Baron Lucas, it was sold in 1917 following Lord Lucas’s death in action in the First World War. A colliery magnate from the north-east, JG Murray, bought the house and its estate. During his 18-year tenure, much of the garden statuary was sold, while extensive felling stripped park and garden of many of their oldest trees.

In 1946 the estate was sold again, on this occasion to the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which leased it to the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering (afterwards the Silsoe Research Institute and, since 1994, part of the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council). The Silsoe Institute maintained the gardens, while the ministry took on responsibility for garden buildings and statuary. Terms were laid down for the opening of the garden to the public.

The Silsoe Research Institute – once responsible for measuring farmers’ bottoms with callipers in order to develop the most comfortable tractor seat – continues to occupy the house. But this summer, English Heritage revealed the results of five years of custodianship of what it has described as the 'Sleeping Beauty’ of Grade I-listed English gardens. Partly financed by a grant of £1.14 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, it is the first major restoration project at Wrest Park in a century.

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Wrest Park

The estate encompasses late-17th-century woodland planting; an explosion of Baroque formalism from the first third of the following century; chinoiserie and Picturesque elements introduced by Jemima Grey; a 'French’ formal parterre, orangery and walled garden of the 1830s; and a Victorian rose garden.

So it is little wonder that John Watkins describes a visit to the garden as 'a walk through 300 years of garden history’. It represents an almost unique survival and is largely unknown outside central Bedfordshire. Restoration work unveiled so far includes the replanted formal Italian garden and a new rose garden which, as late as September 2009, was laid to lawn.

In time, the vision of Wrest that Watkins has overseen will return the entire garden to its appearance between 1839 and 1917, encompassing all its significant periods of development. Watkins describes the work of English Heritage as mirroring the approach taken by the de Greys, 'no great garden revolution, a process of adding and adapting’. He has worked from the extensive series of watercolours of Wrest commissioned by Thomas de Grey as well as the first Ordnance Survey plan of the gardens, published in 1881. Watkins views English Heritage’s plans as part of a 20-year programme.

When the long-term head gardener, Chris Slatcher, who knew Wrest from Sunday School outings as a child, first came to work here in 1979, the team of gardeners extended to 14 men. Now Slatcher has three full-time gardeners along with three apprentices – in Wrest’s case the lottery money has not all disappeared in box hedging and disability access studies: English Heritage has created a training scheme that creates immediate local employment, at the same time equipping its participants with lifelong skills.

The apprentices work under Corinne Price, a heritage gardens veteran who was previously the gardener-in-charge at the National Trust’s Plas yn Rhiw in north-west Wales. Not all have a gardening background – 24-year-old Matthew Parker previously worked in an engineering factory in Kent, while Petra Brigden, 42, gave up her job as a GP’s practice manager after enrolling on a Royal Horticultural Society course and deciding that her real interest lay in plant science.

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Wrest Park

The apprentices – Parker, Brigden and Joanna Huckvale, 23 – now work alongside Slatcher and his team of Nicholas Allen, Richard Bankes and John Cooke. They combine their work at Wrest with study for RHS qualifications at nearby Shuttleworth College. (They have also been entrusted with the task of keeping a photographic record of changes at Wrest, as well as a daily diary, and issuing updates on Twitter and Facebook.) In September, they will be replaced by five new apprentices.

It is an enlightened approach that benefits all involved. In May, Price and Brigden appeared in the local press to celebrate planting the last of 26 new disease-resistant elm trees that flank Wrest’s formal parterre and replace earlier trees killed by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. The new trees were bred in Holland and John Watkins believes that this is the first time they have been introduced into a historic English landscape in such numbers.

'We are restoring the French parterre as part of the overall revival project and the avenue is an integral part of the original design,’ he says. 'These trees give us the best chance of coming close to its 19th-century appearance.’

Eventually the design of the parterre will be restored to its former, more elaborate pattern, its scrolling arabesques 'fixed’ within metal bed-edging, with Versailles planters of clipped trees returned to the perimeter of the parterre. Work will proceed in tandem with the larger task of dredging the garden’s canals and ponds.

There is a strong sense of teamwork at Wrest. Indeed the project has something of the feeling of a co-operative. Hierarchies are fluid and artificial distinctions between the physical task of restoration and the more cerebral business of research have been skilfully eroded. The result is a 'stake-holder’ atmosphere which keeps morale high and the project on course. It is a leadership approach that is simultaneously modern and deeply old-fashioned, mirroring that sense of emotional engagement and possession which great estates formerly inspired in their employees.

English Heritage’s challenge at Wrest, Watkins says, is one of 'revelation’ over restoration, a less intrusive process of uncovering 'ghosts in the landscape’ and revealing what already exists, such as Wrest’s miles of paths. 'It’s all about scale and proportion and defining spaces,’ he says. Much as this garden has always been, in fact.